Sonia Palmieri

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.
While ...
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.

While some women have been successful in promoting a feminist agenda in parliament, the research shows that this is not always a realistic expectation of women. Parliaments, as institutions, have specific cultural norms and practices, some of which actively work against women’s ability to advance gender equality. Understanding the conditions under which women—and men—parliamentarians might be successful in promoting gender equality outcomes has become an important avenue for research and development practice. The focus on gender-sensitive parliaments allows for a framework to identify and encourage the development of those conditions.

There are four key elements of a gender-sensitive parliament. First, it accepts that the responsibility to achieve gender equality, both as a policy outcome and as a process, rests with the parliament as a whole—its male and female Members and staff—and with the organizations that drive substantial policy development: political parties. Second, a gender-sensitive parliament is guided by overarching policies and legal frameworks, which allow the parliament to monitor its achievements towards gender equality and allow for follow up and review. Third, a gender-sensitive parliament institutionalizes a gender mainstreaming approach through its plenary debates, question sessions, committees, and caucuses to ensure that all policy and legislative reviews interrogate any potential discrimination against women or men, girls or boys. Finally, a gender-sensitive parliament fosters a culture of respect for women and their right to be an equal member of parliament.

Roberta Rice

Indigenous peoples have become important social and political actors in contemporary Latin America. The politicization of ethnic identities in the region has divided analysts into those ...
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Indigenous peoples have become important social and political actors in contemporary Latin America. The politicization of ethnic identities in the region has divided analysts into those who view it as a threat to democratic stability versus those who welcome it as an opportunity to improve the quality of democracy. Throughout much of Latin America’s history, Indigenous peoples’ demands have been oppressed, ignored, and silenced. Latin American states did not just exclude Indigenous peoples’ interests; they were built in opposition to or even against them. The shift to democracy in the 1980s presented Indigenous groups with a dilemma: to participate in elections and submit themselves to the rules of a largely alien political system that had long served as an instrument of their domination or seek a measure of representation through social movements while putting pressure on the political system from the outside. In a handful of countries, most notably Bolivia and Ecuador, Indigenous movements have successfully overcome this tension by forming their own political parties and contesting elections on their own terms. The emergence of Indigenous peoples’ movements and parties has opened up new spaces for collective action and transformed the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state.

Indigenous movements have reinvigorated Latin America’s democracies. The political exclusion of Indigenous peoples, especially in countries with substantial Indigenous populations, has undoubtedly contributed to the weakness of party systems and the lack of accountability, representation, and responsiveness of democracies in the region. In Bolivia, the election of the country’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales (2006–present) of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party, has resulted in new forms of political participation that are, at least in part, inspired by Indigenous traditions. A principal consequence of the broadening of the democratic process is that Indigenous activists are no longer forced to choose between party politics and social movements. Instead, participatory mechanisms allow civil society actors and their organizations to increasingly become a part of the state. New forms of civil society participation such as Indigenous self-rule broaden and deepen democracy by making it more inclusive and government more responsive and representative. Indigenous political representation is democratizing democracy in the region by pushing the limits of representative democracy in some of the most challenging socio-economic and institutional environments.

Shauna Lani Shames

Understanding political ambition in an intersectional way requires some familiarity with both subjects. Intersectionality is first explored as a concept and practice, and then the ...
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Understanding political ambition in an intersectional way requires some familiarity with both subjects. Intersectionality is first explored as a concept and practice, and then the discussion turns to an explanation of political ambition (in multiple forms). In addition, intersectionality can be applied to the theory and research on political ambition, particularly in the context of candidate emergence.

Since Crenshaw’s article, and especially after 2000, the term intersectionality and the concept that it defines have become a central part of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in academic circles and of feminist movement organizations in the real world. Although the term originally referred to the intersection of race with gender, it has expanded to include other forms of identity. The central metaphor for the concept as it has come to be used could be seen as the asterisk; each of us has a multiplicity of identities (race and gender, but also age, class, religion, sexual orientation, ability/disability, and more). The “self,” or subject, lies at the intersection of these many axes of identity.

Difficulties continue to arise, however, in finding coherence in both theoretical and empirical works adopting an intersectional perspective. Should the concept be tied to its original understanding of the overlap between race and gender? Which race? With each additional axis of identity that we examine in a scholarly way, we gain specificity, but perhaps lose some generalizability. Taking into consideration all aspects of identity that define a whole person would be nearly impossible across any group. (Even a collection of young gay male Native Americans, say, would likely have all kind of differences that go far beyond their initial similarities.) Pushed to its logical extreme, the concept of intersectionality can threaten a feminist politics that seeks to take the “women” group as its subject.

Turning to women as political candidates, a growing number of studies examine gender and political ambition, particularly in the context of candidate emergence (with a smaller but also growing subset looking at a second type of political ambition, progressive, referring to the decision to run for higher office once someone is already in office.

Multiple works agree that women’s initial and progressive political ambition are lower than their comparable male counterparts’ levels, and such works give us valuable hypotheses and evidence about the reasons for this gender gap. Recent studies have begun to examine race as well as gender in order to perform studies of political ambition that are intersectional in approach and methodology, although these are limited in number, often due to the small numbers of women of color as candidates and elected officials. However, this article profiles some of the excellent work being done on this topic.

By first looking at previous thinking and empirical work on intersectionality, doing the same for political ambition, and then bringing together these two fields of study, this article addresses the theoretical and empirical issues involved in studying political ambition in an intersectional way. In particular, at this point in the study of political ambition, it is crucial that we see more studies examining the different types of identification that make up intersectionality, how they can fit together, and how this overlap can affect women’s political ambition. Although this article is focused on American women, as they are the subject of much of the intersectionality and political ambition literature, this framework can be used more broadly by scholars studying women outside of the United States, who would certainly face many of the same challenges and questions.

Katelyn E. Stauffer and Diana Z. O'Brien

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.

Definitions of feminist research are wide ranging, and incorporate an array of approaches and perspectives. While there is great diversity within feminist scholarship, the work of Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber, in particular, examines the social and institutional norms and practices that shape women’s and men’s lived experiences. Feminist researchers thus challenge disciplinary norms and practices that ignore the roles that gender and sex play in developing and testing broader theoretical frameworks. Feminist political science, in particular, seeks to incorporate sex and gender into classic political science paradigms and to use a feminist approach to offer new insights about politics.

At its heart, feminist political science is rooted in the desire to understand how men and women experience politics differently, often in ways that systematically disadvantage women. This concern with systematic disadvantages lends itself to quantitative research, which relies on statistical methods to create abstract, simplified representations of political systems and institutions in order to allow for clearer inferences. Indeed, looking at all articles published in Politics & Gender, the journal of the Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association, we see that feminist political science research has increasingly drawn on quantitative methods. While there is some fear that statistical abstraction is inadequate for understanding women’s lived political experiences, when guided by feminist research principles, quantitative methods have proven useful for the study of gender and politics.

Our analysis dispels the myth that feminist political science research is hostile to quantitative methods; to the contrary, it has embraced these tools. Building on this analysis, we then ask whether quantitative political science has similarly embraced feminist research. We look at articles published in Political Analysis, the journal of the Society for Political Methodology. We find that these articles rarely address questions of gender and politics. Though gender and politics scholars have accepted statistical methods, applied statisticians within political science have not adopted a feminist approach to studying policies. Gender and politics researchers, moreover, are using statistical tools but not spearheading the development of these techniques.

After providing this overview of the state of the discipline, we offer insights for feminist scholars aiming to conduct quantitative research, as well as for quantitative researchers who would like to conduct feminist research. We argue that quantitative methods provide support for feminist conceptions of politics—beliefs that often require quantitative data in order to be tested. Similarly, applying feminist research principles can inform quantitative work. At a minimum, a feminist approach requires quantitative methods to account for gender and sex in both experimental and observational data. Incorporating these characteristics reveals how the personal is political; failure to do so leads to an incomplete understanding of political behavior and institutions. We believe that the two frameworks can (and should) be used in tandem, resulting in theoretically and methodologically richer and more rigorous work.

Melanie Richter-Montpetit and Cynthia Weber

Queer International Relations (IR) is not a new field. For more than 20 years, Queer IR scholarship has focused on how normativities and/or non-normativities associated with categories of ...
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Queer International Relations (IR) is not a new field. For more than 20 years, Queer IR scholarship has focused on how normativities and/or non-normativities associated with categories of sex, gender, and sexuality sustain and contest international formations of power in relation to institutions like heteronormativity, homonormativity, and cisnormativity as well as through queer logics of statecraft. Recently, Queer IR has gained unprecedented traction in IR, as IR scholars have come to recognize how Queer IR theory, methods, and research further IR’s core agenda of analyzing and informing the policies and politics around state and nation formation, war and peace, and international political economy. Specific Queer IR research contributions include work on sovereignty, intervention, security and securitization, torture, terrorism and counter-insurgency, militaries and militarism, human rights and LGBT activism, immigration, regional and international integration, global health, transphobia, homophobia, development and International Financial Institutions, financial crises, homocolonialism, settler colonialism and anti-Blackness, homocapitalism, political/cultural formations, norms diffusion, political protest, and time and temporalities